Selective highlighting/underlining is used to help learners organize what they have read by selecting what is essential. This method teaches learners to highlight/underline ONLY the keywords, phrases, vocabulary, and ideas that are central to comprehending the content.
Learning Outcomes
- Active reading
- Identify important content
- Taking notes
- Making connections
- Recalling information for later use
Implementation
- Introduce learners to the selective highlighting method and discuss the goal of the activity. Then model the implementation to ensure that learners understand how to utilize selective highlighting. Learners must:
- Read through the selection.
- Reread and start to highlight main ideas.
- Highlight the facts, which are essential vocabulary, not the whole sentence.
- After highlighting, look at what they have highlighted and summarize what they read.
- Take what was highlighted and write a paragraph summarizing what they have read.
- Have learners summarize what they read by utilizing the highlighted content to write a summary paragraph.
Considerations
- Give learners time and means to practice the technique and reinforce successful performance.
- Monitor and support learners as they work.
- Instructors may have learners utilize various colors of highlighters to identify main ideas from details.
- When using an eBook, instructors must ask learners to:
- Read through the selection first.
- Reread and select a portion of the content that the learner wishes to highlight by highlighting or changing the font of the content or utilizing content boxes for comments.
- From the menu, select the “add content-box” option.
- Type in comments into the content box and click anywhere outside the content box to finish.